Light+Design

BEATING BRIGHTLY Restoring Melbourne’s heart.

Text: Matt Caton Images: Joe Casamento / Casamento Photography

Melbourne’s grand old lady of a General Post Office, all dressed up for Christmas.

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espite design alterations, changing tenants and even a fire in 2001, Melbourne’s grand old GPO building still captures the look and feel of the Victorian era with its famous clock tower and stately arches. One of the city’s best known landmarks, its heritage-listed design dates back to 1859 when it first served as Melbourne’s General Post Office and as the original ‘heart of the city’ as the point from which all road distances from Melbourne were measured.

Redeveloped as a shopping precinct in 2004, the GPO now serves as a major arcade with cafes and boutique shops and it’s hard to imagine this quintessential Melbournian space being any more eye-catching. But when the decision was made to restore the historic facade, owners ISPT contracted lighting designers Webb Australia to give the building an even greater presence.

The project evolved over several years according to Webb lighting consultant Rob Hamilton. “For many reasons the project was delayed, then it was off, then it was on again,” he explained. “We did a number of tests over a long period of time using different fixtures and different solutions. Right from the beginning the real trick was finding a solution that was energy efficient and it’s interesting that by the time the project got the final go ahead, the lighting technology had evolved drastically from that in the initial designs.”

DAMAGE CONTROL

Heritage-listed buildings can be a nightmare for contractors and the limitations with this installation were no different. Furthermore, the building had been permanently lit back in the 1950s and was not only inefficient by fancy modern energy standards, it had also taken some damage to the facade. Hamilton knew things were going to have to be planned extremely well. “The biggest issue from the heritage aspect was to ensure we didn’t leave any permanent damage to the building,” he said. “This made attaching fixtures pretty tricky as we had to reuse holes that were already there or use grooves.”

Heritage architect Lovell Chen was involved with the whole process, from fixture selection to the cabling used, and was even on site to ensure the 22

building was not harmed in any way.

Webb Australia engaged Lightmoves with Space Cannon to supply the lighting and control system that would bring the project to life as they were able to develop a bespoke LED fixture solution to meet the design criteria, and used a warm white in its luminaire that proved ideal to enhance the stone of the building façade. The three companies had collaborated before on large-scale lighting features in Melbourne including the kinetic artwork maxims of behavior in Bourke Street, and the Lonsdale Gateway LED installation.

After a thorough and lengthy testing process – which included a column and arch mock-up created by Fabian Barzaghi at Space Cannon’s Northcote factory for proof-of-concept testing – the Space Cannon Aurora 600 RGBW fitting was chosen to light the window arches. The 65 anodised aluminium 600mm wide units contain 32 Philips Luxeon LEDs, which are DMX512-controlled with Remote Device Management (RDM).

Space Cannon’s JilSpot RGBW spots are used to uplight the facade’s columns, and Aurora 300 RGBW LED strips to light the bottom entrance archways of the facade.

THEME SCHEMES

The colour-changing aspect of the installation is stored and triggered by DMX512 on an Enttec E-Streamer MkII. In keeping with the DMX512 standard, no more than 32 DMX devices are wired in a single DMX daisy chain so a series of DMX splitters were used to correctly distribute the signal to all the luminaires. The TecArt four-way DMX splitters not only distribute the DMX signal to up to 128 luminaires, they are also RDM-enabled, allowing bi-directional communication with all luminaires across the whole installation. This allows the user to remotely and individually address each luminaire to monitor its internal operating temperature and to set its start address for commissioning and programming.

All the lighting presets were programmed into the E-Streamer MkII which is linked via RS232 to a Philips Dynalite DTP100 touchscreen at that serves as both the automated time and event scheduler and the user interface.